What happens
Bharata, having repudiated his mother and refused the crown, marches to Citrakūṭa with the army, the court and the widowed queens to bring Rāma back. The argument between the brothers is long and public. Bharata's case is that the boons died with the man who gave them, that the kingdom is Rāma's by law and by everyone's wish, and that refusing it is not virtue but obstinacy. The priest Vasiṣṭha adds the state's case. The brahmin Jābāli argues more radically still — that there is no next world, that a dead father is nothing to a living son, and that Rāma should take the throne — and is angrily rejected.
Rāma will not come. Bharata then asks for his brother's sandals, sets them on his own head, and takes them back. He puts them on the throne, rules in their name, and establishes himself at the village of Nandigrāma rather than in Ayodhyā, in bark cloth and matted hair, for fourteen years.
What it means
The sandals on the throne have become one of the most durable political images in Indian culture, and they are invoked in that sense still: authority exercised by someone who does not claim it, on behalf of someone who is absent.
The episode is the structural mirror of Rāma's acceptance. One brother refuses a gain, the other accepts a loss, and both are refusing the same thing — the idea that a promise stops binding when it becomes expensive. The poem gives Bharata's fourteen years the same weight as the forest years and is explicit that they are harder, because the throne is within reach every day.
Jābāli's argument
The debate at Citrakūṭa contains the most radical speech in the Rāmāyaṇa, and it is not Bharata's. The brahmin Jābāli tells Rāma that there is no next world; that a man is alone and born alone; that a dead father is nothing to a living son and the rites for him are a fiction invented to make people part with their food; and that he should therefore stop performing an obedience that has no object and take the kingdom.
Rāma's answer is anger rather than argument — he calls it the doctrine of a materialist and says a king who reasoned that way could not be trusted — and Jābāli then retracts, saying he spoke only to persuade. The retraction has never entirely convinced readers, and the passage is regularly cited in histories of Indian materialism.
Why the sandals
The sandals are not a symbol Bharata invents. He asks for them, and they are given, and he carries them on his head back to Ayodhyā and installs them, and every act of government for fourteen years is performed in their name and reported to them.
The device solves a real constitutional problem: the kingdom needs decisions taken, and Bharata will not be the person taking them. It is also a permanent public reproach, which is part of why it works.
Further reading
- Bose, Mandakranta. The Ramayana Revisited. Oxford University Press, 2004
- Goldman, Robert P. The Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India. Princeton University Press, 1984
- Nagar, Shanti Lal. Genesis and Evolution of the Rama Katha in Indian Art, Thought, Literature and Culture. B.R. Publishing, 2005
- Ramanujan, A. K. The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan. Oxford University Press, 1999
- Richman, Paula. Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. University of California Press, 1991
See also
- Bharata — Bharata is Rāma's younger brother in the Rāmāyaṇa, whose mother Kaikeyī won him the throne and who refused it, ruling Kosala from a village outside the capital with his brother's sandals set on the seat of power.
- Rāma — Rāma is the prince of Ayodhyā at the centre of the Rāmāyaṇa, exiled for fourteen years by his father's promise, and worshipped across the Hindu world as an incarnation of Viṣṇu and the model of righteous conduct.
- Citrakūṭa — Citrakūṭa is the hill in the Rāmāyaṇa where the exiles settled first, where Daśaratha's death reached them, and where Bharata came with an army to ask his brother to come home.
- Nandigrāma — Nandigrāma is the village outside Ayodhyā in the Rāmāyaṇa from which Bharata governed Kosala for fourteen years, with Rāma's sandals on the throne, refusing to enter the capital.
- Kaikeyī — Kaikeyī is the second queen of Daśaratha in the Rāmāyaṇa, the wife he loved best, who called in two long-unclaimed boons to have her own son crowned and Rāma exiled, and destroyed her husband and her standing in a night.
- The exile of Rāma — The exile of Rāma is the departure of the prince, his wife and his brother from Ayodhyā for fourteen years in the Rāmāyaṇa, accepted without argument on the day he was to have been consecrated.
- Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa — The Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa is the second book of the Rāmāyaṇa, in which Kaikeyī's two boons send Rāma into exile, Daśaratha dies of grief, and Bharata refuses the throne — the most human and least supernatural stretch of the epic.
- Vasiṣṭha — Vasiṣṭha is one of the seven great sages (saptarṣi) of Hindu tradition and, in the Rāmāyaṇa, the household priest of the Ikṣvāku kings — the steady institutional voice at Ayodhyā through the succession crisis, who finally consecrated Rāma fourteen years late.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.